The floor / ceiling discrepancy for power on some cards is way too high

[RaynStargaze]

I kinda made a post like this before - the game is too often decided by a single card that goes unchecked because you didnt draw an answer / werent able to play around it all that well (matchup) / or the card just shouldnt really see play in your opponents deck in the first place.

The whole bomb heaver / scenario interaction is a great simple example.
Playing naked scenario is awful because it should get hit by bomb heaver. If you play scenario you should play a leader that allows you to advance scenario to at least Level2.
But if everyone who plays scenario does that - is including bomb heaver even worth it?
What if your opponent doesnt play scenario - suddenly you got a useless bomb heaver in hand. Does that mean you cut bomb heaver?
But then suddenly nobody is playing bomb heaver and naked scenario is insanely good.

^This is just really stupid. Its a hail mary of the game being basically decided off 1 card / countercard.

I heard about plans to allow checking the opponents deck at the start of the game. That would be a great improvement and would at least allow you to not walk into some of these cards completely blind.

Other examples...

This affects other good cards like Baron - these cards are great because even if they dont find a huge target they are still always solid:
very decent floor and fairly consistent, insane ceiling (e.g. hitting the card that eats the wurm from your graveyard against MO - hitting literally any of the broken boost engines)

mediocre cards:
conditional ones that get insane value but have awful floors like Dagur, Arachas Queen and Keltullis. If you dont draw tall removal or antiboost against Dagur you can pretty much just concede. (Should Dagur even be played outside of last say deal 8 leader situations? again really just hail mary)

and bad cards
like the melee only guy from NG who boosts himself for the same amount an enemy boosts himself but starts at 5 strength and gets rowlocked who just has way too many weaknesses to ever be playable. You cant really plan your game around every silly card your opponent could have because theres just too many of these.

This of course goes both ways - i pointed out mostly engines here so on the flipside things like yrden, Morkvarg, axii are all abyssmal if they dont get provided with targets but if they do they are cards that decide the game by themselves.


Its just kinda silly. It feels extremely unfun to lose to a single card. And theres often times no real lesson to be learned. "Draw one of your 2 answers" isnt a good lesson. "Play around this really obscure card that shouldnt see play in the current meta" is awful - just makes you lose more on average.
Just not fun at all. Gwent is the game where you have a deck of 25 cards but only 3 actually mean anything.

 

[DRK3]

I do agree on the overall statement, that Gwent became too binary with HC, and sometimes not having the counter to a single card (sometimes even a bronze) and you're doomed, i dont recall this happening as often in the betas.

However, i have always been against metadecks and using your so-called 'obscure' cards to surprise the opponent, so using meme decks to defeat tier 1 netdecks is very rewarding, and that suggestion of seeing the opponent's deck at the start would only hurt original players and benefit the idiots running netdecks that are so strong that even when you can easily predict all their cards it will still be hard to defeat them.

On a side note, why do you consider Dagur mediocre and Cahir bad? They are polar opposites, and i'll break down a comparison between them:

-Dagur has 4pt, Cahir has 5

-Dagur boosts from enemy damage, so unless your opponent is SK self damage, you'll have to be the one dealing damage.
Cahir boosts from enemy boosts, so you can get a lot of points vs SC, MO and some NR, SK and SY. If the enemy doesnt boost, you can boost them yourself

- they are both incredibly vulnerable to tall removal and resets

- they are both melee-locked

-Yes, you have the Dagur+leader ability play (now back to how it was, since Harald ability ignores armor now) that if used as a finisher wont be countered
But Cahir can be used with Yennefer with Calveit ability, for similar tactic, with a much higher ceiling, if you build your deck around it

-to me the only point where Dagur wins vs Cahir is that SK has GS, which are like mini-Dagurs and can also provide insane value, so that's 3 engines you have to deal with instead of 1. I've had matches where i lost because i countered one of the GS and Dagur, but not the other GS and it was boosted up to +20pts

 

[dragoonzen]

The game can really use more cards with multiple abilities, especially some of these gold cards with high provision. The bronze card should have 1-2 very binary abilities but gold needs to be re-looked at.

 

[InkognitoXI]

I do agree on the overall statement, that Gwent became too binary with HC, and sometimes not having the counter to a single card (sometimes even a bronze) and you're doomed, i dont recall this happening as often in the betas.
[...]

Of the top of my head I can only remember closed beta weather, which was the worst concept ever in gwent.

Although I do definitely agree that such binary design is toxic and the game became about as binary as in the Closed Beta, which is definitely a large step back.
That aside, has there ever been a single time in which artifacts did anything even remotely healthy to the game ?

 

[DRK3]

Of the top of my head I can only remember closed beta weather, which was the worst concept ever in gwent.

Although I do definitely agree that such binary design is toxic and the game became about as binary as in the Closed Beta, which is definitely a large step back.
That aside, has there ever been a single time in which artifacts did anything even remotely healthy to the game ?

Cant argue with that, im afraid i was one of those who abused closed beta weather, for a ~90% winrate. And i didnt use Monsters, i used Skellige, which was the 2nd faction with more weather immunity units, but it was enough to catch almost everyone offguard and win.

Looking back now, i do agree that was not healthy design, but i never got bored of catching opponents by surprise.

(and yes, artefacts were always more damaging than beneficial to gwent HC)

 

[mazeebra]

However, i have always been against metadecks and using your so-called 'obscure' cards to surprise the opponent

I got myself a nasty surprise by two resilience cards today, in a deck where they normally don't get played. It was nasty.

 

[DRK3]

I got myself a nasty surprise by two resilience cards today, in a deck where they normally don't get played. It was nasty.

That is almost impossible on PC/ iOS now, since adrenaline rush was changed on the latest patch, so now there's only 3 cards that can get resilience (the SC dwarf, the SY dude no one uses and a 1/4 chance on Neutral Musicians of Blaviken)
But since you're on consoles, its probably someone trying something no longer possible on PC.

 

[mazeebra]

That is almost impossible on PC/ iOS now, since adrenaline rush was changed on the latest patch, so now there's only 3 cards that can get resilience (the SC dwarf, the SY dude no one uses and a 1/4 chance on Neutral Musicians of Blaviken)
But since you're on consoles, its probably someone trying something no longer possible on PC.

Ahh yeah, I saw that in the updates, but I was skimming through, so I was not sure.

Anyways, I'm moving over to PC soon I guess, but I'm not looking forward to scenario cards. I guess I will have to stick with Nilfgaard and Yennefer. I'm also not a big fan of defenders..

I did however like that they brought back armour. Yes, it's been about 6 months since I last played Gwent..

 

[InkognitoXI]

Ahh yeah, I saw that in the updates, but I was skimming through, so I was not sure.

Anyways, I'm moving over to PC soon I guess, but I'm not looking forward to scenario cards. I guess I will have to stick with Nilfgaard and Yennefer. I'm also not a big fan of defenders..

I did however like that they brought back armour. Yes, it's been about 6 months since I last played Gwent..

If you hate Scenarios you can always play Seasonal, almost noone plays Scenarios there and people playing them usually get (rightly so) punished for that.

 

[mazeebra]

Yeah, seasonal mode is completely uninteresting to me.

Well, time will tell what happens when I move to PC. Perhaps I stop playing again.

 

[Payus]

If you hate Scenarios you can always play Seasonal, almost noone plays Scenarios there and people playing them usually get (rightly so) punished for that.

I just played vs a NG player that played the full Poison Scenario Caretaker Assire package in seasonal and crushed him by playing a SK list that has only bronzes and all of those are 1 to 3 power + some weather cards.

Their thought must have been "I play broken poison I win, doesn't matter the mode". Well, no, my friend. No.

 

[RaynStargaze]

Appreciate the people giving their feedback.

Please stay on topic - wether or not any single card is better/worse is not relevant for the main issue.
Feel free to disagree with whatever my judgement is in that regard.

The topic is that the performance of individual cards is too often the deciding factor in regards to winning or losing and the player is too often not in control to influence it.
Matchup/luck of the draw/reasonable expectation of what cards can be played with the intent of winning consistently and people going against that (hail mary players - not exclusively meme decks). i wouldnt call people playing naked scenario "meme decks" but the issue is approximately the same.

I only consider the main game mode since i personally do not play seasonal.
I think seasonal is a great mode for people to get creative if the current iteration allows for it (and isnt just the same deck over and over after day1 like some of them). I would prefer if "random card suprise leading to 50 pt swing" would be a feature for seasonal so people can enjoy it there - but not in the core game.

 

[mazeebra]

Variation is good and seasonal mode is irrelevant. It's just a "for fun" mode.